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Summary
T
he U.S. intelligence community is expected to provide indicators and
warnings of a wide variety of security threats—not only risks of in-
ternational wars that might threaten U.S. interests or require a U.S.
military response, but also risks of violent subnational conflicts in countries
of security concern, risks to the stability of states and regions, and risks of
major humanitarian disasters in key regions of the world. This intelligence
mission requires the consideration of activities and processes anywhere in
the world that might lead, directly or indirectly, to significant risks to U.S.
national security.
In recent years, with the accumulation of scientific evidence indicating
that the global climate is moving outside the bounds of past experience and
can be expected to put new stresses on societies around the world, the U.S.
intelligence and security communities have begun to examine a variety of
plausible scenarios through which climate change might pose or alter secu-
rity risks. In 2010, as part of its ongoing work with the National Academy
of Sciences/National Research Council (NAS/NRC) on issues related to
climate and security, the U.S. intelligence community asked the NAS/NRC
to organize the study whose results are described in this report.
The central purpose of the study, as defined in its statement of task, was
“to evaluate the evidence on possible connections between climate change
and U.S. national security concerns and to identify ways to increase the
ability of the intelligence community to take climate change into account
in assessing political and social stresses with implications for U.S. national
security.” The study committee was tasked to “focus on several broad
questions, such as: What are the major social and political factors affect-
1
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2 CLIMATE AND SOCIAL STRESS
ing the relationship between climate change and outcomes relevant to U.S.
national security? What is the basis for this knowledge and how strong is
it? What research and measurement strategies would strengthen the basis
for this knowledge?” In response to this charge, this report presents a con-
ceptual framework for addressing such issues, offers an evaluation of the
available evidence, identifies key factors linking climate change phenomena
to security concerns, and offers conclusions and recommendations related
to: (a) improving understanding of climate–security linkages; (b) improv-
ing monitoring and analysis of the factors linking climate change to social
and political stresses and to security risks; and (c) improving the ability to
anticipate potential security risks arising from climate phenomena.
As the study developed, and upon consultation with the study’s spon-
sors, we focused our efforts in three specific ways. First, we focused on
social and political stresses outside the United States because such stresses
are the main focus of the intelligence community. Second, we concentrated
on security risks that might arise from situations in which climate events
(e.g., droughts, heat waves, or storms) have consequences that exceed the
capacity of affected countries or populations to cope and respond. This
focus led us to exclude, for example, climate events that might directly
affect the ability of the U.S. military to conduct its missions or that might
contribute directly to international competition or conflict (e.g., over sea
lanes or natural resources in the Arctic). We also excluded the security im-
plications of policies that countries might undertake to protect themselves
from perceived threats of climate change (e.g., geoengineering to reduce
global warming or buying foreign agricultural land to ensure domestic food
supplies). These kinds of climate–security connections could prove highly
significant and deserve further study and analysis. They could also interact
with the connections that are our main focus; for example, an action such
as buying foreign agricultural land might go almost unnoticed at first, only
creating a crisis when the country where the land is located experiences a
crop failure it cannot manage with imports. Third, we concentrated on the
relatively near term by emphasizing climate-driven security risks that call
for action by the intelligence community within the coming decade either
to respond to security threats or to anticipate them.
Although these choices of focus helped bound our study, they left it
with some notable limitations. Climate change is a global and a long-term
phenomenon. Events within the United States and those outside the country
affect each other, indirect links between climate and conflict can be related
to direct ones, and the effects of climate change will not stop beyond a
10-year horizon and, in fact, can be expected to increase at an increasing
rate. Thus a complete security analysis should project the risks of climate
change beyond the next decade in order to inform U.S. government security
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SUMMARY 3
policy choices in the near term that will prepare the nation for events in
later decades.
Our study includes the full range of potentially disruptive events that
are becoming more likely because of climate change, whether or not a
particular event can be unequivocally attributed to human-caused climate
change rather than to natural variation. We made this choice because
any such climate events can become disruptive and create a need for U.S.
government action regardless of whether they can at this time be uniquely
attributed to anthropogenic climate change.
KNOWLEDGE ABOUT CLIMATE–SECURITY CONNECTIONS
Anthropogenic climate change can reasonably be expected to increase
the frequency and intensity of a variety of potentially disruptive environ-
mental events—slowly at first, but then more quickly. Some of this change
is already discernible. Many of these events will stress communities, societ-
ies, governments, and the globally integrated systems that support human
well-being. Science is unlikely ever to be able to predict the timing, mag-
nitude, and precise location of these events a decade in advance, but much
is already known that can inform security analysis, including details about
the character of events that are becoming more likely and about the general
trajectory of increasing risk.
Conclusion 3.11: Given the available scientific knowledge of the climate
system, it is prudent for security analysts to expect climate surprises
in the coming decade, including unexpected and potentially disruptive
single events as well as conjunctions of events occurring simultaneously
or in sequence, and for them to become progressively more serious
and more frequent thereafter, most likely at an accelerating rate. The
climate surprises may affect particular regions or globally integrated
systems, such as grain markets, that provide for human well-being.
The conjunctions of events will likely include clusters of apparently
unrelated climate events occurring closely in time, although perhaps widely
separated geographically, which actually do have common causes; sequences
or cascades of events in which a climate event precipitates a series of other
physical or biological consequences in unexpected ways; and disruptions
of globally connected systems, such as food markets, supply chains for
strategic commodities, or global public health systems. The surprises are
likely to appear first as unusually severe extensions of familiar experience.
1
Conclusions and recommendations are numbered to indicate the chapter where they appear
and their ordering within that chapter.
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4 CLIMATE AND SOCIAL STRESS
Some of them are likely to be felt in regions remote from where the actual
climate events take place. It is prudent to expect that some of these events
will create or exacerbate conditions affecting U.S. national security.
It makes sense for the intelligence community to apply a scenario ap-
proach in thinking about potentially disruptive events that are expectable
but not truly predictable. For example, when climate models disagree about
the direction of a climate trend even when the fundamental science strongly
suggests that change is likely, it may make sense to consider the security
implications of two or more plausible trends as a way to anticipate risks.
Conclusion 4.1: The overall risk of disruption to a society from a cli-
mate event is determined by the interplay among several factors: event
severity, exposure of people or valued things, and the vulnerability of
those people or things, including susceptibility to harm and the effec-
tiveness of coping, response, and recovery. Exposure and vulnerability
may pertain to the direct effects of a climate event or to effects medi-
ated by globalized systems that support the well-being of the society.
The security risks are unlikely to be anticipated by looking only at
climate trends and projections. Each of the factors affecting disruption is
changing, and several are changing in ways that can be projected with some
confidence for a decade or more at the country level or below. Because risk
reflects the interactions among these factors and not only the magnitude of
climate events, events of a magnitude that has not been disruptive in the
past can cause major social and political disruption if exposure and sus-
ceptibility are sufficiently great and response is inadequate or widely seen
as such. The other side of this coin is that unprecedentedly large climate
events do not necessarily lead to security threats if actions have been taken
to reduce exposure or susceptibility or increase coping capacity and if au-
thorities are seen to be actively responding to events.
Conclusion 4.2: To understand how climate change may create social
and political stresses with implications for U.S. national security, it is
essential for the intelligence community to understand adaptation and
changes in vulnerability to climate events and their consequences in
places and systems of concern, including susceptibility to harm and the
potential for effective coping, response, and recovery. This understand-
ing must be integrated with understanding of changes in the likelihoods
of occurrence of climate events.
Knowledge from several scientific fields provides useful general insights
about the components of vulnerability and how they shape the effects of cli-
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SUMMARY 5
mate events on social and political systems. Much remains to be done, how-
ever, to advance this knowledge and make it operational for assessing the
risks of climate change to social and political systems in particular places.
Conclusion 5.1: It is prudent to expect that over the course of a decade
some climate events—including single events, conjunctions of events
occurring simultaneously or in sequence in particular locations, and
events affecting globally integrated systems that provide for human
well-being—will produce consequences that exceed the capacity of the
affected societies or global systems to manage and that have global
security implications serious enough to compel international response.
It is also prudent to expect that such consequences will become more
common further in the future.
Conclusion 5.2: The links between climate events and security out-
comes are complex, contingent, and not understood nearly well enough
to allow for prediction. However, the key linkages, as with societal
disruptions, seem prominently to involve (a) exposures to potentially
disruptive events directly or through globally integrated systems af-
fecting human well-being and (b) vulnerabilities (i.e., susceptibility to
harm and the effectiveness of coping, response, and recovery efforts).
In addition, security outcomes depend on the reactions of social and
political systems to actual or perceived inadequacies of response.
Available knowledge of climate–security connections that feature soci-
etal vulnerabilities indicates that security analysis needs to develop more
nuanced understanding of the conditions—largely, social, political, and eco-
nomic conditions—under which particular climate events are and are not
likely to lead to particular kinds of social and political stresses and under
which such events and responses to them are and are not likely to lead to
significant security threats.
The empirical knowledge base on the connections between extreme
events and political instability or violence also suggests some hypotheses
that are worthy of further examination. For example, available knowl-
edge is consistent with a model in which the link of climate events to the
potential for significant violence, conflict, or breakdown depends on these
factors:
• the nature, breadth or concentration, and depth of pre-existing so-
cial and political grievances and stresses;
• the nature, breadth or concentration, and depth of the immediate
impacts of the climate event;
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6 CLIMATE AND SOCIAL STRESS
• the socioeconomic, geographic, racial, ethnic, and religious profiles
of the most exposed groups or subpopulations, as well as their sus-
ceptibilities and coping capacities;
• the ability and willingness of the incumbent government and its
internal and external supporters to devise, publicize, and implement
effective, transparent, and equitable short-term emergency response
and then longer-term recovery plans;
• the extent to which emergent or established anti-government or
anti-regime movements or groups are able to take strategic or tacti-
cal advantage of grievances or problems related to responses to the
event;
• the type, breadth, and depth of legitimacy and support for authori-
ties, the government, the regime, or the nation–state; and
• the coercive and repressive capacities of the government and its
willingness and ability to engage and carry out repression.
TOWARD IMPROVED MONITORING,
ANALYSIS, AND ANTICIPATION
The intelligence and national security communities are not the only
parts of the U.S. government that need improved understanding of vulner-
abilities to climate change to achieve their goals, and the U.S. government
is not the only actor that has this need. Such improved understanding is
among the objectives of the many federal scientific agencies concerned with
climate change and will be valuable to the various federal, state, local,
private-sector, and international organizations concerned with improving
adaptation to climate change, reducing potential damage from climate
events, and exploiting potential opportunities related to climate change.
These shared needs for knowledge suggest that knowledge development is
best pursued as a cooperative activity involving many organizations.
A recent report of the Defense Science Board (Defense Science Board,
2011) emphasized the need for federal interagency cooperation in dealing
with issues of adaptation to climate change. It called for “a structure and
process for coordination to more effectively leverage the efforts to ad-
dress global problems” and “a whole of government approach on regional
climate change adaptation with a focus on promoting climate change re-
silience and maintaining regional stability.” We agree with the need for
a whole-of-government approach and note that the effort should include
improved knowledge and monitoring of changing vulnerabilities as well as
of climate trends.
Within the U.S. government, the entity charged with developing funda-
mental knowledge about climate vulnerabilities is the U.S. Global Change
Research Program (USGCRP). One of the five scientific objectives in its
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SUMMARY 7
strategic plan for 2012–2021 is to “[a]dvance understanding of the vulner-
ability and resilience of integrated human–natural systems and enhance the
usability of scientific knowledge in supporting responses to global change”
(U.S. Global Change Research Program, 2012:29). The intelligence com-
munity is an obvious potential beneficiary of this effort.
Conclusion 4.3: Many of the scientific needs of the intelligence commu-
nity regarding climate change adaptation and vulnerability are congru-
ent with those of the USGCRP and various individual federal agencies.
Intelligence agencies and the USGCRP can benefit by joining forces in
appropriate ways to advance needed knowledge of vulnerability and
adaptation to climate change and of the potential of climate change to
create social and political stresses.
A whole-of-government approach to understanding adaptation and
vulnerability to climate change can advance the objectives of multiple agen-
cies, avoid duplication of effort, and make better use of scarce resources.
Such an interagency effort will help in anticipating the social and political
consequences of climate events and in building the basis for a widely useful
system for monitoring and analysis. This system would aid in anticipating
security threats and could be employed by the U.S. intelligence community
and other domestic and international entities to inform choices about re-
sponses to climate change.
Building Fundamental Understanding
Recommendations 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, and 6.1: The intelligence community
should participate in a whole-of-government effort to inform choices
about adapting to and reducing vulnerability to climate change.
Recommendation 3.1: It should, along with appropriate federal
science agencies, support research to improve the ability to quantify
the likelihoods of potentially disruptive climate events, that is, single
extreme climate events, event clusters, and event sequences. A special
focus should be on quantifying risks of events and event clusters that
could disrupt vital supply chains, such as for food grains or fuels, and
thus contribute to global system shocks.
This research should include efforts by climate scientists to improve
fundamental understanding of the effects of climate change on the likeli-
hoods of extreme climate events and also efforts to apply the methods
of extreme value statistics to these problems, particularly the problem of
estimating the likelihoods of clusters of extreme climate events that are
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8 CLIMATE AND SOCIAL STRESS
dependent on the same underlying climatic processes. Such efforts would
help in defining climate event scenarios for countries, regions, and systems
that could be used as the basis for climate stress tests.
Recommendation 4.1: It should, along with the USGCRP and other
relevant science and mission agencies, develop priorities for research
on climate vulnerability and adaptation and consider strategies for
providing appropriate research support. The interagency effort on vul-
nerability and adaptation should include agencies responsible for com-
munity resilience and disaster preparedness and response domestically
and internationally.
Such an interagency process does not imply that climate change should
be defined as a security issue. Rather, it indicates that security issues are
among those that should be considered in developing and executing a re-
search agenda on climate change adaptation and vulnerability.
Recommendation 5.1: It should, along with other interested agencies,
support research to improve understanding of the conditions under
which climate-related natural disasters and disruptions of critical sys-
tems of life support do or do not lead to important security-relevant
outcomes such as political instability, violent conflict, humanitarian
disasters, and disruptive migration.
Understanding the connections between harm suffered from climate
events and political and social outcomes of security concern is arguably the
most important aspect of climate change from a national security perspec-
tive, but it has received relatively little scientific attention until now. The
disaster research community, which has been the locus of research on the
political effects of climate events, has not been well connected to the climate
research community.
To build the needed fundamental understanding will require the inte-
gration of knowledge of political and socioeconomic conditions in countries
of interest; knowledge from climate science about the potential exposure
of these countries to climate events; and knowledge from social science
about the susceptibility of these countries to being harmed by those events
and the likelihood of effective coping, response, and recovery at local to
national levels. These sources of knowledge come from different communi-
ties of experts, which will need to communicate with each other but do not
necessarily do so now. An important need is to integrate the social science
of natural disasters and disaster response with other forms of analysis.
This body of knowledge is particularly important for assessing the security
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SUMMARY 9
consequences of climate change because disruptive climate events will typi-
cally be perceived and responded to as natural disasters. The recommended
interagency process can help bring these communities of experts together,
as they tend to associate with different groups of agencies.
Improving Monitoring and Analysis
Conclusion 6.1: Monitoring to anticipate national security risks related
to climate events should focus on five key types of phenomena:
1. Climate events and related biophysical environment phenomena;
2. The exposures of human populations and the systems that provide
food, water, health, and other essentials to life and well-being;
3. The susceptibilities of people, assets, and resources to harm from
climate events;
4. The ability to cope with, respond to, and recover from shocks; and
5. The potential for outcomes of inadequate coping, response, and
recovery to rise to the level of concern for U.S. national security.
Given that security threats arise from combinations of all of these phe-
nomena, indicators and monitoring systems should be developed to follow
them at various levels from local to national.
Conclusion 6.2: Developing an adequate system for monitoring the
conditions that can link climate events to national security concerns
will require maintaining critical existing observational systems, pro-
grams, and databases; the collection of new data; the analysis of new
and existing data; and the improvement of analytic systems, leading to
better understanding of the linkages over time and to improved indica-
tors of key variables where quantitative indicators are appropriate and
feasible to produce. It will typically require finer-grained data than are
currently available. It will also require improved techniques for inte-
grating quantitative and qualitative information.
We emphasize that improved understanding and monitoring of the vari-
ous elements of climate vulnerability—a key link between climate events
and security concerns—is an objective that the intelligence community
shares with the USGCRP and many other institutions at federal, state, lo-
cal, and international levels. To address the challenges of monitoring, which
include both new and enduring methodological problems, the intelligence
community needs to draw on knowledge from the academic research com-
munity, as some current efforts are already doing.
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10 CLIMATE AND SOCIAL STRESS
Recommendation 6.1: One of the objectives of the recommended
whole-of-government effort to inform choices about adapting to and
reducing vulnerability to climate change should be to build the scientific
basis for indicators in this domain.
This effort would support activities by the research communities in-
volved in assessing exposures and vulnerabilities to environmental change
to identify a relatively small number of key variables relevant to the social
and political consequences of climate events. The effort of the climate sci-
ence community to identify a small number of “essential climate variables”
suggests the kind of process that could be used.
Recommendation 6.2: The U.S. government should begin immediately
to develop a systematic and enduring whole-of-government strategy for
monitoring threats connected to climate change. This strategy should
be developed along with the development of priorities and support for
research.
The monitoring should include climate phenomena, exposures and vul-
nerabilities, and factors that might link aspects of climate and vulnerability
to important security outcomes, and it should be applicable to climate
issues globally. It should also include making and periodically updating
priority judgments about when and where high-resolution monitoring is
needed. Analysis will require the integration of quantitative indicators with
traditional security and intelligence analytic methods.
The value of monitoring efforts is likely to increase over time because
of improvements in monitoring systems and because potentially disruptive
climate events are expected to increase in frequency and intensity in the
future. Existing open-source monitoring systems that may provide useful
information on key variables should be periodically examined for their
potential utility, but with critical attention paid to indicator selection, data
reliability and validity, and cross-case and cross-national comparability.
For the great majority of existing and potential indicators, the required
spatial and temporal resolution is finer than what is currently available.
High-resolution monitoring will be especially important for highly signifi-
cant and highly vulnerable locations. The appropriate level of spatial and
temporal resolution for indicators varies, however, with the substantive
domain. In setting priorities for indicator development and improvement,
the intelligence community should take into account the gaps between the
existing and the desired resolution and should invest in improved resolu-
tion of those indicators judged to be the most needed and the most useful
in places of concern.
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SUMMARY 11
It is important to develop and validate monitoring systems now in
order to have baseline data for future studies of climate event impacts and
for social and political stress analyses. Validation is particularly important
for emerging monitoring technologies, such as those involving sophisticated
data mining algorithms (e.g., of Internet postings) and remote observations
that are overlaid on geographic information systems. Such techniques may
produce outputs that catch the eye and are very impressive on first glance,
but they are sometimes closely held by their developers and difficult to vali-
date, especially if they involve infrequent events. Indicators and monitoring
results should be interpreted with caution until these techniques develop a
record of validation.
Organized international collaborations with potentially affected soci
eties and governments and the open sharing of data will be important
a
spects of developing the needed monitoring systems. Such collaborations
are likely to play a crucial role in gaining acceptance of higher- esolution
r
monitoring at critically vulnerable locations. The collaborations are also
likely to benefit many governments and international organizations that
have a stake in reducing the risks of climate change to human and inter
national security; the U.S. government in particular can benefit from
data-gathering efforts in and by other countries. Of course, U.S. govern-
ment agencies will continue to gather some kinds of information that will
not be openly shared, and there will be questions about which data and
i
nformation-gathering methods can and should be openly shared. Depend-
ing in part on how interagency collaborative relationships are structured
and managed, there could also be suspicions related to the involvement
of U.S. intelligence agencies in international information-gathering efforts
related to security. Such issues will need to be addressed in ways that we
have not had the opportunity to consider in this study. Nevertheless, the
benefits of open, international data development and sharing should be
taken seriously as work on monitoring systems proceeds. These benefits
include the development of compatible concepts, databases, and indicators
across countries, which help speed scientific progress and improve the abil-
ity to learn from experiences in other countries.
Improving the Capacity to Anticipate Security Threats
Recommendation 6.3: The intelligence community should establish a
system of periodic “stress testing” for countries, regions, and critical
global systems regarding their ability to manage potentially disruptive
climate events of concern. Stress tests would focus on potentially dis-
ruptive conjunctions of climate events and socioeconomic and political
conditions.
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12 CLIMATE AND SOCIAL STRESS
The intelligence community presumably already uses an analogous
process to consider the ability of foreign governments and societies to
withstand various kinds of social and political stresses. This recommenda-
tion calls on the community to incorporate climate risks and the associated
exposures and vulnerabilities into such exercises. The concept of a climate
stress test provides a framework for integrating climate and social variables
more systematically and consistently within national security analysis.
A stress test is an exercise to assess the likely effects on particular
countries, populations, or systems of potentially disruptive climate events.
The recommended stress tests would involve analyzing the likely effects of
an event at some projected time of occurrence in terms of key variables af-
fecting susceptibility, coping, response, and recovery or the failure thereof,
and the likely responses within regions or countries of interest in the event
that these actions are perceived to be inadequate. The tests would draw on
knowledge about the potential events and each of the other types of phe-
nomena and would provide a major way of making knowledge about cli-
mate events, exposures, and vulnerabilities operational in security analysis.
Stress tests should assess the potential consequences for security of cli-
mate events under either of two conditions: when climate scientists can say
with some confidence that the events will be increasingly likely to occur or
become more severe, or when the events seem increasingly likely to occur
based on a fundamental understanding of climate dynamics but available
evidence is not yet sufficient for climate scientists to attach confidence to
such projections. Stress tests might also be triggered by assessments indicat-
ing that event likelihood, exposure, or susceptibility is increasing or that
the capacity to respond adequately to certain kinds of climate events is
declining in a region or country of concern.
The results of stress tests would inform national security decision mak-
ers about places that are at risk of becoming security concerns as a result of
climate events and could be used by the U.S. government or international
aid agencies to target high-risk places for efforts to reduce susceptibilities
or to improve coping, response, and recovery capacities. The stress testing
process would also help advance understanding through an accumulation of
data on potentially disruptive events and their social, political, and security
consequences.
Countries, regions, and systems of particular security interest should be
prime targets for periodic stress testing. Given the joint criteria of signifi-
cant potential for climate change impacts and importance to U.S. national
security, it is likely that no more than 12 to 15 countries will need to be
monitored and subjected to periodic stress tests over the next decade, many
of which are likely to be in critical, and often shared, watershed areas in
South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. If the criteria for importance to
the United States are expanded to include foreign policy and humanitarian
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SUMMARY 13
concerns, then the number of countries to be monitored and stress-tested
regularly over the next decade may rise to between 50 and 60. Stress test-
ing should also be applied periodically to global systems that meet critical
needs, including food supply systems, global public health systems, supply
chains for critical materials, and disaster relief systems.
Decision science techniques should be used and further developed to
ensure that the stress tests make the best use of the available information.
Stress testing might draw on various methods, including the qualitative in-
terpretation of available knowledge, formal modeling, and interactive gam-
ing approaches. Decision science techniques should be employed to design
the processes and interpret the input from different kinds of expertise and
modes of analysis in order to make the best possible use of information.
The stress-testing exercises should themselves be monitored and critically
evaluated so that stress-testing methods can be improved over time.
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